The Oscars: Man or Muppet?

“Man or muppet?” That is the question. Even Socrates, rarely a man to flinch from candor, never dared to ask it outright. But the question bounced into the foreground on the afternoon of the 84th Academy Awards, and it lingered well into the evening, despite the astonishing fact that nobody sang it out loud. Why not? It was the title of a musical number, from the new film of “The Muppets,” which was nominated for Best Original Song. (There were only two such nominations in the category. More astonishment, not to mention grief over glories past.) The producers found time for several oddities, including a skit about a focus group—supposedly convened to weigh “The Wizard of Oz,” performed in black-and-white by Christopher Guest and his repertory company, and utterly unconnected to last night’s event. Yet, somehow, a song that had a fifty-fifty chance of laurels (and won them) did not merit an airing. We can only conclude that the question it posed was just too discomforting and hard.

Ryan Seacrest, for example, whose very name resembles a brand of luxury yacht, so smooth are the waves on which he sails through life: man or muppet? Well, put it like this: a man arrived on the red carpet, in the service of E!, and went home fully muppeted. In retrospect, the identity of the muppeteer should have been simple to call: Sacha Baron Cohen, clad in the costume of his latest character—or, to industry skeptics, cannily grabbing some free publicity for “The Dictator,” the next chapter in his saga of calculated outrage. Resplendent in milk-white, and bemedalled to the hilt, he tipped an urn of ashes—allegedly those of the cremated Kim Jong-il—all over Seacrest. For once, even Ryan’s Olympian standard of serenity was breached; like many of his fellow Californians, he is not wholly at ease with mortality, or prepared to agree, at any foreseeable juncture, to its stringent terms. Olivia Wilde, interviewed as she approached the “Vanity Fair enclave,” and therefore in a soothing mood, argued that Ryan was to be envied: “How many people can say they have human remains on their tux?” Again, a profound query, worthy of Luis Buñuel, though Seacrest himself was in no condition to discuss it. With his smile nailed into position, he was clearly a flustered spirit, and a kindly program manager insured that we switched from dust to dust, leaving Ryan with his floury sorrows and spending most of the pre-show period back in the ringside studio, amid the fashion therapists.

Over the years, I have come to prefer the gibberish of these experts, lightly powdered with panic, to the coarse-ground rhetoric that prevails inside the auditorium. When one of the resident style queens, epistemologists to their nail lacquer, gazed at Tina Fey and said, in tones of unfeigned awe, “I’ve never seen this hair on her,” we were vouchsafed a genuine insight into the unreliable surface of reality, as it shimmers on Pacific shores. It made you wonder if the hair, like the dress, was something that could be lifted off and replaced with other hair, or perhaps clipped onto the scalp of another woman entirely; and from that, in turn, arose a tempting vision of the whole Oscar preparation zone as being governed not by Burberry or Balenciaga or Givenchy but, more robustly, by Playmobil, with hundreds of excited six-year-old girls taking the stars apart and swapping body parts, heads, and accessories in a never-ending quest for the shiniest doll.

What else would explain the magnificence of Angelina Jolie, with her streaming tresses, the two and a half hectares of scarlet lip gloss required to cover her mouth, and, most telling of all, the single, flawless leg that was permitted to emerge from the slit of her long skirt and planted cockily in full view? She was merely doling out the screenplay awards, but her pose bore a definite, don’t-fuck-with-me trace of the gunslinger, and so it was, across the time zones, that a billion people sat there with their hands up: Freeze. I have seen nothing like it, in terms of the power to strike dumb and stupefy, since Jack Nicholson, introducing a tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni, showed the scene from “Zabriskie Point” in which a television set explodes into a thousand angry shards. That was Oscar night, 1994. Those were the days.

It is easy to forget, harking back to last night’s hoopla, that somewhere at the core of it sat an actual awards show. The fact that the Oscar telecast is a bust, that it is doomed—almost designed—to be a bust, and that the varying degrees of bustness are all that separates one year from the next, should neither surprise nor even dismay us, because the Academy Awards are like teen-age sex. It’s all about the fizzing buildup, and the self-persuading aftermath: the occurrence itself, nowadays, is nothing but fumble and flub, though, to hear the crowing tones of the participants, you’d swear that they were souls in bliss. The fizz has increased, of course, in the past decade, to the brink of the intolerable, thanks to the Internet, which encourages the fomenting of preëmptive critical clamor—the sole stipulation being that the dafter the matter in hand, the more swollen the spleen of our opinions. The tussle between George Clooney and Jean Dujardin, say, for the honor of Best Actor in a Leading Role, has been cried up for weeks, if not months, to a degree that would certainly embarrass both gentlemen, each of whom seems the kind of guy to preserve a commendable cool. Clooney, it is fair to soothsay, will have other chances; whether they will come Dujardin’s way, through no fault of his own, is less of a sure bet. Anybody who clutches his Oscar and thanks Douglas Fairbanks, as Dujardin did, is fine by me, and, besides, George didn’t need another golden statue. He had already taken the precaution of bringing one along; her name was Stacy Keibler, and she was wearing Marchesa.

Highlights? Well, Chris Rock yanked us from our snooze. Asghar Farhadi, a deserving winner for “A Separation,” took a moment to reassure us that his fellow Iranians “despise hostility and resentment,” the implication being that they do not, contrary to certain claims made on the U.S. campaign trail, spend their weekends cooking up helpful specks of uranium-235. A remarkable creature named Thomas Langmann, in his capacity as the producer of “The Artist,” was granted the highest crown: a victory made all the more endearing by the fact that Langmann, infringing the laws of nature, looked like an extremely happy Peter Lorre. He exchanged a passing high-five, on his path to the podium, with Harvey Weinstein, not unlike a Wimbledon winner gratefully greeting his coach. Christopher Plummer, by contrast, struck an effortless chord of decorum, mellifluousness, and pride, though, as he himself conceded, he had had plenty of time to rehearse. Billy Crystal acknowledged that suavity, adding, “When my grandfather was eighty-two, we didn’t let him go to the movies.” Crystal, if anything, sharpened and polished his facets as the evening progressed, being enough of a pro to realize that a shockless broadcast is a menace to the ratings, and that dull is dull, even if it springs from the mouth of the Academy’s President: “Thank you for whipping the crowd into a frenzy,” Crystal said, his features masked in deadpan, as Tom Sherak completed his laudatory drone—the last and least attempt to conjure up a binding theme for the occasion. I never quite worked out what this was, but it appeared to be something along the lines of, “How nice it is to go to the movies.” Genius. How do they come up with these things? “Our mission,” Tom declared, slipping into fluent Kirk, “is to promote excellence in the motion picture industry.” No question. Muppet.

Photograph by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”